Passive gold gain is a nice extra to get items in League of Legends. Depending on the mode, there are other ways to earn gold like killing enemy champions or minions. Masteries and runes can also contribute towards building a little fortune in items. With so many options available, which is the best?
This article will bring to a close, at least for now, our series on effective health (EH). In this article you’ll find a summary of the findings from our three previous analyses on effective health. Moreover, we included four sortable tables with the effective health and cost per unit of EH for five of Leona’s levels: 1, 6, 11, 16 and 18. They roughly correspond to the early, mid and late game which are the most distinguished phases in the game.
Levels 6, 11 and 16 were chosen because at those levels a new skill point can be placed on Leona’s ultimate, Solar Flare. Those levels are well spread and provide a good place to evaluate the benefits that an item provides at different important stages of a match.
Continue reading »
In past articles we have discussed what is effective health and how items compare to each other. The final question to ask is: what items provide the most effective health for the least gold?
The past article relied on Leona to calculate the effective health (EH) that each item provides. Based on those values we can calculate the cost effectiveness by dividing the price of each item by the amount of EH provided and get the cost of each unit of EH that an item provides.
Continue reading »
In our previous article What is Effective Health? we proposed an analysis on the effective health that items provide. Such an analysis can only be performed if a champion’s base health, armour and magic resistance are included; because they also contribute to effective health. For this reason Leona has volunteered as a test subject tank to make a thorough comparison between items.
For each of Leona’s levels we’ll calculate the effective health provided by each item and we’ll plot it against the other items taking into consideration Leona’s base statistics. The analysis is divided in two parts: physical and magical. Effective health depends on the value of armour or MR available so the best way of comparing items is to consider what kind of damage they are preventing.
Continue reading »
In League of Legends there are 125 items divided in tiers and among the two existing game types: Classic and Dominion. The tiers are basic, advanced, legendary and consumable. Basic items can be bought with just gold, advanced items require at least a basic item to be bought while legendary items require at least one advanced item, consumables are items that once used are removed from a champion’s inventory.
There are 28 basic items, 62 advanced items, 26 legendary items and 9 consumables. From the whole 125 items, 97 are available in both game types. The remaining 28 are divided like this: 18 are available only in Classic and 10 only in Dominion. To buy the 125 items in League of Legends would cost 195778 gold.
The following table contains all items available in League of Legends. It can be sorted by clicking on a header and by holding the Shift key and clicking on additional headers to add other criteria.
The items’ list is up to date according to version 1.0.0.130 of the game.
Continue reading »
In a previous article about the cost of statistics we couldn’t evaluate the cost of raising cooldown reduction (CDR), spell vamp (SV) and gold per ten (Gp10) because there aren’t any basic items that provide boosts to them. Moving on to advanced items we can find a few bonuses that will allows us to derive the cost of the mentioned statistics.
The table below lists all advanced items that provide CDR, SV and Gp10. Knowing the cost of the other statistics’ bonuses we can subtract their cost from the cost of each item until only the cost of CDR, SV or Gp10 remains. For better accuracy, the cost for the basic stats is taken from the items used in the recipe of each item. For example, Hextech Revolver’s AP cost is taken from Amplifying Tome; not from Blasting Wand.
Continue reading »
Is it better to improve the offense or the defence of a champion? There’s no doubt that carries benefit more from improved attack damage than from buying better armour, but do they? If you are tougher to kill then you can deal damage for longer. A good defence can enable a mage to survive for a few critical seconds that allow another round of spells that win a team-fight.
The question is: which statistics are easier or cheaper to improve? All champions need offense but can defence be just as good for a carry or mage? Should tanks build only offense and rely on their innate sustainability? An analysis of the cost of improving each statistic can shed some light on these questions.
We’ll analyse statistics available at the basic tier of items: attack damage, ability power, armor, attack speed, critical strike, health, health regeneration, life steal, mana, mana regeneration, magic resistance and movement speed. Cooldown reduction, spell vamp and gold per ten seconds aren’t provided by any basic items so we’ll look at them another time.
Continue reading »
Dominion introduced a new map, rules and items to League of Legends. Some of the new items substitute items from Classic, others are original. While most items seem tailored for physical damage dealers, others champions can still find some useful bonuses among the new items.
Among the many statistics that make up a champion, Dominion items provide health more than anything else. Six items provide a health bonus which shows how necessary durability is on Dominion. Second comes attack damage (AD) with five items and then attack speed with three items. Finally, ability power (AP) and life steal (LS) have two new items each.
Continue reading »
Life steal (LS) is a prime statistic for carries to stay sustainable and get an edge on opposing carries. It goes extremely well with carries’ need for attack damage (AD) as it scales from it as well as from attack speed (AS).
The table below has all items that provide bonus LS with their cost and cost per LS. The latter value indicates how much is paid for each unit of LS in that item. The lower the cost per LS unit the more cost effective the item is.
Continue reading »
The relationship between champions and manna is one of extremes. On one side of the fence there are manaless champions that may use health to power their abilities or simply be cool-down based. On the other side of we have champions whose intensive use of manna can deplete their mana pool in seconds.
The latter are the champions that will benefit the most from items that provide manna regeneration (Mp5). There truly aren’t that many champions that consume manna in vast quantities but Anivia, Swain, Karthus and Kassadin have ultimates that truly demand it.
The following table contains all items that provide a Mp5 bonus with their associated cost effectiveness: the cost of each unit of Mp5. The table can be sorted and by clicking on the last header we can see what cost effectiveness reveals.
Continue reading »